Wednesday, December 04, 2013

It seems to be generally accepted that as you get older -
assuming you avoid botox and facelifts - you get the face you deserve. The scribbled
map of wrinkles, crows’ feet, frown lines and smile lines you finish up with,
is determined by what kind of face you’ve chosen to present to the world over
the preceding years. The same is true of a story – the ending is determined by
what went before, the narrative grows organically to produce an appropriate,
fitting conclusion. So with an Unhappy Ending in fiction – a death, a loss, a
closing down of promising paths into the future – you see where it comes from, and
thus you tend to have a feeling of acceptance along with your sadness. This is
even true of surprise endings. Yeats talked about the surprising word that
seems inevitable, and it’s the same with a surprise ending – you may not have
expected it, but once it comes along you realise there is no other way the
story could have come to an end.

But that’s fiction. Life’s not like that, it’s more ragged
and various and unresolved. We talk about moving on after an Ending, we claim
it’s an opportunity, we say As one door
closes another opens. All of which suggests we’re turning our backs on the
Ending, hurrying away from it as if it’s unwelcome, unlucky, toxic. That’s
because an Ending, an Unhappy Ending anyway, leaves you disoriented – Did that just happen? How did that happen?
An Unhappy Ending in life has none of that reassuring sense of inevitability
you find in fiction. It leaves you sad, it taints everything that went before
it, making the whole long journey look as if it was merely a path towards this bad
conclusion. And then anger arrives, like bad weather, and you can appear to be
suffering from Tourette’s, spitting swear words at perceived or actual
injustice.In fiction, an Unhappy Ending may be the perfect way to
finish a novel. In life, an Unhappy Ending is a wound. But wounds heal. And
wounds, eventually, are where the best stories come from.

About Me

Yorkshire based, London born, married, two children, I'm a writer of novels, short stories, TV, film and radio. This is a blog about now and then, success and disappointment, books, cancer ... everything really.
@markillis1
markillis.co.uk